Chapter XVIII: An Interview

“I would have laid down my life for my friend: my friend asked of me a harder thing.”

He stood before the prince, his head erect, his hand motionless upon his sword hilt. Joseph, sitting, as quietly, in the chair he had pushed back from the table, regarded him steadily, dispassionately--even, at last, with an odd touch of pity in his expression. The season was early August; the place, a private cabinet in the old imperial palace called the Burg.

“So much I have inferred,” said the young archduke, his voice not cold but even, “from the Duke of Parma’s recent advices to me recommending your recall. I had not known before, Tiretta, that a soldier looked upon the vindication of his honour as so difficult a task.”

He noted, with an observant interest, the spasm that twitched the set features at his words. He was in all things curious and analytical.

“I have deserved this,” was the low answer. “Stab, sir, and turn your creese in the wound.”

“You do me an injustice,” said Joseph calmly. “It is to the scalpel, not the sword, that I would have you reveal yourself. If I probe, I probe for instruction. The soldier’s code, for instance--is it not a strict one? What harder thing did I ask of you than to obey orders? I seek simply for information.”

“No need to. I am a villain.”

“Tut-tut, my friend! That is merely to beg the question. You know my views very well. A man is not to be summed up in that convenient fashion. Is it, for instance, the assertion of a villain that he would sacrifice his life for his friend?”

“Would to God I could do it, and so cut the knot!”

The eyes, watchful, inquisitive, in the pale narrow young face, canvassed the speaker curiously.

“Well,” said their owner at length: “will you not answer my question?”

“You ask me, sir, what was peculiarly hard to me, a soldier, in that mere call to obedience? Nothing, I answer. That you could send me into the fight, having first broken my sword in its scabbard--that was the hard thing.”

The prince seemed to ponder a little, sitting without movement, save for a slight corrugation of his brows.

“No, I do not understand,” he said presently. “You would seem to imply that I wilfully dedicated you to destruction.”

“Wilfully, yes. I do not say consciously.”

“Can will be unconscious of itself?”

“In princes, sir, because no one dreams of questioning it in them. There can be no conscious force without conscious resistance.”

The young philosopher considered again, as appraising a plausible theory.

“Very well,” he said. “Then, to return from the abstract to the particular, what is represented in fact by this symbol of the broken sword?”

“My broken honour, sir, for which you were responsible.”

“No, you must explain.”

“What--have you forgotten the incident at the ford, from which all this luckless mission derived? To send a convicted pander to sing his employer’s praises! God in heaven! Who but a prince could have failed to foresee the end?”

“Well, sir--continue. I begin, I think, to perceive.”

“Not justly, sir, nor the whole. I sang your praises; I was loyal to my friendship and my humiliating task. Never doubt that for one instant. But what was the force of an advocacy so recommended? What any but a prince might have foretold. I was scorned, I was repudiated, and rightly, because my honour was in question; and that I could not endure. It was above all things dear to me, and I wrought to exculpate it. I could not have gained a hearing without--and that is my excuse and my crime.”

He ended, breathing deeply. Still the unwinking eyes canvassed him, and without emotion, it seemed.

“You sought to convince her of your honour?”

“I had no alternative.”

“By converting it, so vindicated, to a dishonourable purpose?”

“I never ceased to extol your Highness’s noble qualities--no, not to the end.”

“The end!”

For the first time some emotion showed itself in Joseph’s face. He started, as if he would rise; but leaned back again, resolute to control himself.

“You may question my honour, sir,” said Tiretta. “In the name of God, leave hers unsullied by a thought.”

Steadfastly, for some moments, the two regarded one another; then Joseph rose from his chair, and, walking to a window, stood looking out upon an inner court of the palace which it commanded. Presently, without turning, he spoke:

“You are very severe on princes, my friend; yet it seems they can be guileless in their trusts.”

“If, sir, by guileless you mean despotic, they are the most trusting souls on earth. So might we all be, if a wish with us overruled, without question, every possible or impossible objection. How can princes enter into common human feelings when they have had no least experience of them? To feel, one must suffer and be denied.”

“Do I not feel? I think I could convince you.”

“You feel for yourself, sir--I do not doubt it--in this disillusionment about one you had thought to be your true friend and servant.”

“I feel for you, Tiretta.”

He had turned as he spoke, and now came forward, until he stood face to face with the man who had wronged him. There was a look in his eyes strangely like compassion.

“Truly I can feel for you,” he said--“as for anyone who lets his heart go out towards the unattainable.”

A shadow seemed to fall upon the soldier’s face.

“So speaks the prince,” he said--“generous and fine-minded; but still the prince. Can a prince be slave to love, sir?”

“History would seem to say so.”

“Ah! He may rule everything else, but not that: he cannot rule what, in common with all men, he is subject to. A prince in love is just a man in love. He, too, may suffer the unattainable.”

For some moments the archduke stood silent; then, slightly nodding his head, made answer:

“True, Tiretta--that is quite true. I cannot command love. I might possess, and murder to possess its form: still not to me but to the shadow of the dead would belong all that was worth possessing in it. Have you deserved death? I do not know. I only know I would not have the thing I seek made unattainable; and that would it become, were I to kill you. Yet what to do? Tell me, my friend, for I am in your hands.”

“In mine!”

Emotion, sudden and startled, shook the inflexible voice.

“Tiretta!”

The young prince put a hand, quite movingly and unexpectedly, on his erst-favourite’s shoulder. The action, generous and manly, spoke the real heart under all its philosophic veneer.

“Admit,” said Joseph: “have you not a little exaggerated the cause in order to justify the end? The name you gave yourself----”

“It was given me, sir, by implication.”

“By whom or what? The sweetest and most innocent lips in the world? You wrong them, I am sure, even more than you do yourself or me. But the fault was mine, you say; yet I had always honestly thought you insusceptible to such emotions--a dreamer, a wooer of abstractions. Well, I was mistaken, it seems. Your strength was unequal to the task my faith in it imposed on you. Which of us was most to blame--I in directing, you in accepting? What need to quarrel about that now? We have made a botch of it between us, and the thing for us to discuss is how best to mend a lamentable case. Will you not tell me the whole truth, Tiretta, my friend?”

“Before God, I will.” The man was profoundly touched.

“Then, say, are you to her what she is to you?”

“That were impossible.”

“Nay, you equivocate.”

“On my soul, then, I believe that, heaven helping us, she would give me her hand to-morrow.”

A slight tremor seemed to take the archduke’s features. He stood back, quitting his hold on the other. A minute’s tense silence ensued.

“Well,” he said at length, just repressing a sigh. “I repeat I am in your hands.”

Again, impulsively, he advanced and renewed his caressing touch.

“There can be no issue but one. You know it, Tiretta--man, you know it. We are all in the bonds of fate, and helpless. Now, listen and believe me. If it were possible, I would yield her to you. It is not possible. Then would you condemn your friend to a loveless match?”

“What would you have me do?”

His voice was quite wrung and broken.

“I would have you,” said Joseph, “atone, in the only way you can, the wrong you have done, not to me but to her.”

“I am to go--never to see her again--to leave her believing me faithless?”

“Better a faithless lover than a faithless wife. So only can you heal the wound you have inflicted. For her sake, Tiretta.”

“Why do you not call in your guards, and have me silenced for ever? I will make no resistance.”

“Because I am human, though a prince, Tiretta.”

For a while, desperate, still mutinous, the man’s torn soul fought out its tragedy of renunciation. And at last impulsively surrendered. With bowed head, he spoke the words:

“You have a noble mind, sir. If you will not retaliate on me as you might, death is always somewhere waiting for the soldier. I will go do what I may to seek an honourable one. And so heaven forgive me and requite your Highness!”

He took the gracious young hand in his, put his lips to it, and, turning, left the room, walking with blinded eyes and upright head, like a prisoner who passes from the dock to the condemned cell.